Nvidia promises up to 700% return on GPU investment for AI inference work as world’s most valuable company continues journey to $4 trillion market cap

By James On Jul 11, 2024

Nvidia temporarily became the world’s most valuable company in June 2024, with a valuation of $3.34 trillion. That’s nearly double the amount since the beginning of the year. While the company is now below Microsoft and Apple again, it’s only a matter of time before it reclaims the top spot.

HPC wire In reports from the Bank of America Securities 2024 Global Technology Conference, Ian Buck, Vice President and General Manager of Nvidia’s hyperscale and HPC businesses, discussed the financial benefits of investing in GPUs.

“For every dollar a cloud provider spends on a GPU, they’ll earn back $5 over four years,” Buck claimed. Inferencing tasks lead to even higher profitability: “Here the economics are even better: For every dollar spent, they’ll turn over $7 over the same period, and it’s still growing,” he said.

Shortages in Blackwell

Nvidia is optimizing its products to meet the growing demand for AI inference, using Nvidia Inference Microservices (NIMs), which support popular AI models like Llama, Mistral and Gemma. The company is also focusing on its new Blackwell GPU, which is purpose-built for inference and improving power efficiency.

Initially, supply may be tighter than Nvidia would like, but the company isn’t worried. “With every new technology transition comes… a mix of supply and demand challenges. We certainly experienced that with Hopper, and there will be similar types of supply and demand constraints in the Blackwell ramp… at the end of this year and next year,” Buck said.

Looking to the future, Nvidia has already begun sharing details about its Rubin GPU, announced at Computex and expected to ship in 2026, with cloud providers. Buck emphasized the importance of early collaboration, saying, “It’s really important for us to do that — data centers don’t fall out of the sky, they’re big construction projects.”

Nvidia’s steady advances in AI and GPU technology seem promising for investors, and a $4 trillion market cap seems within reach. The path forward, however, is not so clear. Due to its rapid growth, Nvidia is facing inevitable scrutiny from antitrust authorities, and this is not expected to go away anytime soon.